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Senior Editors Stefano Caria and Kate Orkin will join us at the launch event for our forthcoming VoxDevLit on Monday February 5th to outline the key takeaways for policymakers from research on job search barriers. Sign up here. In the meantime, we featured five articles and a podcast this week, here are the key takeaways.
In today's article, Ragui Assaad, Thomas Ginn and Mohamed Saleh explore whether Syrian refugees in Jordan affected educational outcomes for Jordanians. In Jordan, local policymakers allowed refugees to attend local public schools with minimal barriers, and foreign donors allocated resources to cover the resulting shortfalls. This research finds that these inclusive policies did not come at a negative cost in terms of the educational outcomes of Jordanians.
In yesterday's article, Ernest Liu, Yi Lu, Wenwei Peng and Shaoda Wang explore the effects of a high-stakes judicial organisational reform, rolled out since 2014 in China, which aims to alleviate court capture by taking away local governments' financial and personnel controls over local courts. They demonstrate that it has successfully boosted local court independence, curbed protectionism in cross-region lawsuits, and stimulated investment flows between regions.
When parents have multiple children, how do they distribute limited resources between them? In Wednesday's article, Michele Giannola explores this questions in the context of India, where inequality between siblings accounts for 32% of the overall level of inequality in child human capital. Evidence shows that parents decide how to distribute educational opportunities between children based on the perceived returns to investments.
An important policy challenge for governments in low- and middle-income countries is finding sustainable ways to implement effective Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes at scale. In Monday's article, Johannes M. Bos, Abu S. Shonchoy, Saravana Ravindran and Akib Khan explore the impacts of integrating an ECD intervention into Bangladesh’s National Nutrition Services programme. They find that this intervention was cost-effective and had positive impacts on child development in Bangladesh.
Tuesday's article evaluates the impacts of an urban public works programme in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Simon Franklin, Clément Imbert, Girum Abebe & Carolina Mejia-Mantilla find that public works increase the welfare of the poor in Addis Ababa by 20%. This is mainly driven by rising private sector wages, but also through direct benefits for participants and benefits from improving amenities.
Despite their political leanings or rhetoric, governments around the world have consistently used industrial policy. And now economists are increasingly talking about – and more credibly estimating – the benefits of it too. In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Dani Rodrik discusses what we know about the effectiveness of industrial policy, key lessons for policymakers in developing countries, and the evolving policy agenda that it represents.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's articles and podcast, featuring research on intimate partner violence, early childhood interventions, credit supply shocks, state capacity, and high-speed internet in Africa.